Hacker News Reader

>After an interview in 2017 went poorly — mostly due to me floundering at the more difficult SQL questions they asked me

Could be you dodged a bullet. A company with advanced interview questions may have some ugly SQL code. For jobs that lean heavily on SQL, I expect candidates to know things like windowing & dynamic variables, in SQL & an ORM library. For SWE's, I feel basic SQL is fine.

View on HN

I agree. Using advanced SQL as a hiring signal would be silly in that it just discards a lot of programming candidates for little benefit.

I'd be happy if they knew what EXPLAIN was, since that impacts production on a daily basis.

Also, the OP is basically "fighting the last battle" again. Most interviews don't filter out candidates based on SQL.

Source: DBA.

Yes! Window functions and decent demonstration of datasets with varying granularity on top of the basic join/aggregation assessment is all that is needed in the SQL for interviews. And if you're an engineer, attention to redefining the query plan through appropriate use of temp tables. Anything else is a poor use of precious interview time for both parties, in my opinion

Reply on news.ycombinator.com